All the lights are on him.
“In Whose Name?” offers a rare look at Kanye West during the most tumultuous years of his life.
Directed by first-time filmmaker Nico Ballesteros, the unauthorized documentary follows the controversial rapper across six years and 3,000 hours of footage — that’s ultimately edited down to just 106 minutes.
The filming, which began in 2018 and ended in 2024, was mostly shot on iPhones. “In Whose Name?” does not reveal exactly how Ballesteros, who was just 18 when the project began, secured such proximity to the 24-time Grammy winner.
But the nearly two-hour doc isn’t without its surprises, and it offers unfiltered access to Ye, 48, during his battle with bipolar disorder, the contentious breakdown of his marriage to Kim Kardashian and the fallout from his antisemitic remarks about going “death con 3” on Jewish people in 2022.
“In Whose Name?” also includes past footage featuring Lady Gaga, Drake, Lebron James, Chris Rock, Diddy, Rihanna, Virgil Abloh and Justin Bieber to showcase West’s successful chart-topping career before his fiery fall from grace.
It also looks back at when West stormed the stage and stole the mic from Taylor Swift after she beat out Beyoncé for the Best Female Video award at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
“Here I am, just an innocent, 19-year-old girl minding my own business at the VMAs,” a woman in West’s entourage, mocking Swift’s stunned reaction, joked following the infamous incident. “Oh! Someone’s interrupting me! Oh!”
Moments later, West is backstage after one of his concerts. In a foreshadowing of what’s to come, he offers up a toast “to the d—–bag” who is “making history now.”
Here are some of the biggest revelations and takeaways from “In Whose Name?”
Pharrell Williams warned Kanye West about ‘f–king up’ his life and career in 2018
In 2018, the “Through the Wire” rapper and Pharrell Williams talked about mental health and the Bible.
“If this was a scene in the f–king Bible, God’s like, Okay, I’m gonna not have your wife leave you, I’m gonna not have Adidas drop you, I’m gonna not have all your fans turn their back on you,” West, standing, said as Williams, 52, sat on a couch in a recording studio.
Unbeknownst to West, all of those things would later come to pass.
“One f–ked up facet, just like a diamond, one f–ked up facet can f–k the whole thing up,” the “Happy” hitmaker cautioned West. “So you can’t put out a single, and the s–t goes left from where you already hinted you were f–king going. Because now they’re gonna question everything you do after that.”
“You are taking control of the water in the fish tank. This is yours,” Williams warned. “But it is very easy to flip and f–k all this up.”
‘Turning Point USA’ founder Charlie Kirk makes a posthumous appearance
One of the most surprising appearances in “In Whose Name” is Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed while on stage for an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10, 2025. He was 31.
The Turning Point USA founder appeared with West and Candace Owens, who was serving as his conservative group’s communications director at the time. Kirk sat quietly as the pair discussed culture, politics and breaking the internet.
“Culture will always be upstream from politics,” Owens, 36, said. “Whoever can control culture, can control politics.”
Although the encounter was filmed in April 2018, and more than seven years before Kirk’s tragic death, Ballesteros opted to leave the moment in to highlight how the documentary is already “changing with history.”
“It’s unfortunate, and may they rest in peace, but there are people in the film who are no longer here with us,” the 26-year-old director told The Post.
Owens, meanwhile, returns later on during West’s infamous “White Lives Matter” controversy at Paris Fashion Week in 2022.
But “In Whose Name?” chooses not to focus on the scandal and West’s subsequent antisemitic rants, and instead centers on the rapper’s response to the backlash that saw him lose lucrative deals with Adidas, Gap, Balenciaga and more.
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s marriage began to crumble in September 2018
The doc included past footage of Kardashian and the “Devil in a New Dress” singer’s relationship crumbling as early as 2018, which was years before the Skims founder filed for divorce.
Kardashian, 44, and West began dating in 2012 and got married in 2014. They welcomed four children during their nearly seven-year marriage: North, 12, Saint, 10, Chicago, 6, and Psalm, 6.
The “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” star ultimately filed for divorce from West in Feb. 2021. Their divorce was finalized more than one year later in Nov. 2022.
After the “Gold Digger” rapper returned home from a trip to Chicago to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a White Sox game, Kardashian confronted her then-husband for telling reporters that he and the family were moving to the Windy City to live in his late mom’s old house.
Donda West, the rapper’s mother, passed away in Nov. 2007 at 58.
“We can talk about that later, and more thoroughly, but – ” Kim said during the argument, although she was interrupted by West, who admitted he had been off his meds for five months.
“It ain’t no but!” West shouted before storming off.
A similar incident unfolded later in the doc when the “Graduation” artist once again lost his temper during a trip to Uganda.
After telling his cousin “f–k you” for “trying to tell me what to do” and “trying to change my mind” about his support for then-President Donald Trump, Kim started to cry.
“At some point, it’s a reality that people say no,” she told West. “People say no to me on a daily basis, and I don’t just start screaming and throwing a tantrum. That’s just not normal.”
“That’s just my personality,” West responded, as Kardashian added, “But your personality was not like this a few years ago.” West then argued that he “used to scream backstage,” and the mom-of-four pointed out that it was “far and few between” and “not daily and every single conversation.”
Kanye West made Kris Jenner cry
At one point, Kardashian’s mom, Kris Jenner, and West got into a heated conversation about the rapper not taking his medication.
“Y’all demasculated me and made me feel like a piece of s–t. And the only reason you got away with it is because I was medicated,” West, worried about what people were saying about him online, shouted in the raw moment. “I would rather be dead than be on medication.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kris answered, as West began yelling, “It do matter! It does matter! It does matter!”
“It matters to us, and you. It doesn’t matter what the internet says. It matters what we think, Ye,” Jenner replied. “I love you. I don’t want you to be not perfect. I love you. And I want my daughter to love you the way you want her to love you.”
Although West never revealed what medications he was prescribed, he did tease one drug in his 2016 song “FLM.”
“You ain’t never seen nothing crazier than / this n—a when he off his Lexapro,” he rapped in the “Life of Pablo” track. Lexapro, however, is an antidepressant used to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder, per the Mayo Clinic. It is unclear what, if any, medications West took for his bipolar disorder.
‘SNL’ star Michael Che confronted Kanye West backstage after the show
West butted heads with “Saturday Night Live” star Michael Che after the “Stronger” rapper was the NBC show’s musical guest during the Season 44 premiere in Sept. 2018.
During a pro-Trump rant, West appeared to claim that the cast “bullied him backstage” for wearing his Make America Great Again hat.
“And what this shows is we can’t be controlled by monolithic thought,” he said to boos from the audience at the time. “You can’t always have when you have a black subject matter like Cosby that you have to have a black comedian talk about it.”
“You know what I mean?” West added while looking at Che.
Che later confronted the “Life of Pablo” artist about the incident backstage, and the clash was caught by Ballesteros’ camera.
“You good with me? For real? That was f–ked up,” the “Weekend Update” co-host said after getting in West’s face. “Why you gonna call me out when I don’t have a chance to say anything for myself?”
“Why would you do that to me? I work here. I work here and we treat everybody that comes in like family, and you’re gonna sell us out?” Che added. “That’s f–ked up. We look up to you. We love you. What’ve you got against us?”
West, for his part, replied that he does “have some things against ‘SNL’” before comedian Chris Redd broke them up, and someone else asked Ballesteros to stop filming.
Kanye West wanted to be treated like a foreign dignitary during 2018 White House visit
During West’s car ride to the Capitol in Oct. 2018, he received a call from President Trump’s son-in-law and then-Senior Advisor, Jared Kushner, regarding the visit.
“I need to go the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go,” West told Kushner as his black SUV rolled toward the White House. “That’s the only way that I’m going to go in. I have to go the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go. That’s the only way that I’m going to go in.”
“Listen to me,” he continued, although Kushner couldn’t be heard on the other side of the phone. “I’m not going to step outside. I’m not going to put my life in danger. I put my life in danger by wearing the [Make America Great Again] hat, and I need to be loved and respected as such.”
“If I get killed wearing the hat in front of the White House, you’re not gonna win any midterms,” West added before raising his voice at Ivanka Trump’s husband. “Listen! Finish listening to me and hear me!”
Less than two years later, West launched his own presidential campaign for the 2020 White House.
Elon Musk and Kanye West bonded over their respective splits from Grimes and Kim Kardashian
By the time the documentary’s third act comes around, Kim has filed for divorce from West.
This development leads to one of the most bizarre moments of “In Whose Name?”
Billionaire Elon Musk, following one of West’s shows in Miami in 2022, asked about Kim and opened up about his own relationship with then-girlfriend Grimes (real name Claire Elise Boucher).
Musk and Grimes split for good in 2022 after four years and having three kids together.
“So are you and Kim off and on or something?” the Tesla CEO asked while the pair awkwardly rested on a big circular bed together. “Or, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”
“Clare and I, Grimes, we’re sort of in the same text stream, she’s like, ‘I love you.’ And then like, a day later, like, ‘I hate you,’” Musk, 54, continued while West chuckled about the situation.
After the SpaceX founder tried to break the tension with some laughter of his own, West asked him, “And what do you do?”
“You probably know exactly,” Musk responded. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, OK.’”
“I don’t have the answers,” West finally replied. “Answers to everything except for that.”
The shot ends with West and his entourage, including Kim-lookalike Chaney Jones, exiting the venue as Musk stood there alone, waving goodbye.
Ballesteros, however, revealed that this wasn’t the only footage of the X owner that he obtained for “In Whose Name?” – although it was the only clip he chose to include in the documentary.
Early in 2018, when the project was just getting off the ground, the director bumped into Musk for the first time during a party at West’s Calabasas home.
“I was following Ye’s every movement around this party,” Ballesteros told The Post. “And within the first five to 10 minutes of me following him at the beginning of this event, he gets elated and walks over, and then I whip pan, and then there’s Elon Musk.”
“That’s like within the first five to 10 minutes of me filming Ye in the entire journey,” he added.
“In Whose Name” premieres in select theaters Friday, Sept. 19.